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The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of how warehouse operations and design are affected by the move toward integrated omni-channels.

A structured literature review is conducted to identify and categorize themes in multi- and omni-channel logistics, and to discuss how aspects related to these themes impact and pose contingencies for warehouse operations and design.

The review revealed a lack of focus on warehouse operations and design in multi- and omni-channels. Instead, most articles published in scientific journals discuss changes in consumer demand and implications for the network level, concerning aspects such as the organization and management of material and information flows, inventory management, resources, actors and relationships. Ten themes in omni-channel logistics were identified and grouped into two categories: the value proposition and channel management; and the physical distribution network design. The themes and related aspects have implications for warehousing, and by combining these with general warehousing knowledge, the authors derive a comprehensive and structured agenda is derived to guide future research on omni-channel warehousing.

This paper outlines a research agenda, including detailed research questions, for advancing the theory on warehouse operations and design in omni-channels.

The agenda can inspire practitioners in their work to understand the upcoming challenges and address relevant issues in omni-channel warehousing, taking into consideration its interdependence with value proposition, channel management and network decisions.

This is the first comprehensive review focusing on and synthesizing available literature on omni-channel warehousing. This topic has until now received limited coverage but is of increasing importance to scholars in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to present an investigation of facilities management (FM) needs of warehouse tenants to inform future warehouse design.

This study examines FM needs that must be designed into warehouse projects. It identifies tenants' FM requirements in warehouses; investigates the relationship between tenant satisfaction and performance of different facilities in warehouses; and recommends design and FM practices that warehouse owners should adopt to give tenants value for money. The research involves a quantitative study of tenant requirements for using warehouses. A questionnaire survey was conducted on tenants to find out their important requirements with a structured instrument. The sample was tenants of warehouses in Singapore.

The results reveal that users' main needs and priority in warehouse operation comprise: incorporating an operations office within warehouses; providing an air well along the loading/unloading bays; ensuring no interruption of electricity supply; providing air‐conditioning to the office; and providing good housekeeping.

The paper provides information that can be the foundation for developing a set of generic tenant FM requirements that could accelerate the design development of warehouses.

The design of retail backroom storage areas has great impact on in-store operations, customer service level and on store life-cycle costs. Moreover, backroom storage in modern retail grocery stores is critical to several functions, such as acting as a buffer against strong demand lifts yielded by an ever-increasing promotional activity, stocking seasonal peak demand and accommodating e-commerce activities. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework to design retail backroom storage area. Furthermore, the authors aim to draw attention to the lack of literature on this topic, while clarifying the relationship between this promising research stream and the considerable body of research regarding the design and operations of conventional warehouses, as well as retail in-store operations.

The key literature on backrooms, grocery retail, in-store operations, warehouse design and operations was reviewed. This allowed an understanding of the gap in the literature regarding the design of backrooms. Moreover, a case study methodological approach was conducted in a Portuguese retailer to extend the literature review.

Despite having functions similar to conventional warehouses, backroom storage facilities have particularities that deserve a distinct analysis. Thus, the authors stress these differences and demonstrate how they influence the development of a novel backroom design framework.

This paper fills a gap by proposing a framework to design backroom areas. Furthermore, this research may help practitioners to better design backroom areas, since this process currently lacks a formal and standardized procedure.

This purpose of this study is to develop a simple framework for designing a warehouse incorporating lean principles. Multiple objectives like resource planning, material handling, storage, inventory management, including internal and external logistics, are considered.

A design procedure to incorporate lean principles for designing a warehouse for a complex multi-model production line has been proposed. The preferred standards and factors affecting warehouse design, the inputs and outputs of process flow characteristics, are incorporated into the design. Current and future state value stream mappings are drawn to bring out the challenges in the value flow.

The framework for designing a lean warehouse have been implemented and validated in a heavy machinery manufacturer. This framework will ease the work of the future lean-based warehouse designers to apply simple step-by-step processes to achieve the goal with the nearest accuracy. The steps followed can be summarized as defining the lean processes, making the lean process as the design base, collecting inputs like stock-keeping unit master, inventory and space details, and building the lean warehouse design with the step-by-step processes.

Practical tips on warehouse design have been explained focusing on the part volume, quantity handled, inventory and throughput. This will assist the practitioners in designing a lean warehouse and leading to an improved operational performance.

A simplified design procedure for designing a lean warehouse, along with a real-time case study has been enumerated in detail. Effective use of space and resources with lean tools and techniques lead to better storage and picking efficiency resulting in an overall reduction in cost.

Real-time visibility and traceability in warehousing could be accomplished by implementing the internet-of-things (IoT) technology. The purpose of this paper is to develop a roadmap for designing an IoT-based smart warehouse infrastructure and, respectively, design and apply the IoT-based smart warehouse infrastructure using a developed roadmap. More specifically, this study first identifies critical components to design an IoT-based smart warehouse infrastructure. Second, the study at hand identifies essential factors that contribute to the successful implementation of IoT-based smart warehouse infrastructure.

A qualitative-descriptive method, through a comprehensive review of the relevant studies, was used in this study to develop a roadmap. A prototype system was then designed to simulate a case company’s actual warehouse operations in one of the manufacturing companies in Indonesia.

A framework was proposed which is viable for designing an IoT-based smart warehouse infrastructure. Based on the data collected from a case company, the proposed smart warehouse infrastructure design successfully implemented real-time visibility and traceability and improved overall warehouse efficiency.

While the framework in this research was carried out in one of the developing counties, the study could be used as the basis for future research in a smart warehouse, IoT and related topics.

This research enhances the limited knowledge to establish the IoT infrastructure for a smart warehouse to enable real-time visibility and traceability. This study is also the first to specifically propose a framework for designing an IoT-based smart warehouse infrastructure. The proposed framework can motivate companies in developing countries to deploy efficient and effective smart warehouses using IoT to drive the countries’ economic growth.

This paper presents a framework for the design of warehouse layout to organize the design process, facilitate the task of designers, and highlight important design issues to help warehouse managers make informed decisions. The framework accounts for several factors and operations of warehousing in the design, and addresses design decisions required to respond to them. It attempts to develop a layout that has several characteristics such as modularity, adaptability, compactness, accessibility, flexibility, and distribution of movement to enable it to respond to changing conditions, improve space utilization, and reduce congestion and movement.

This paper aims to develop an approach to design a warehouse that uses class-based storage policy in a way that minimizes both space cost and material handling cost.

The authors argue for and develop an optimization model for joint determination of lane depth, lateral width and product partitions for minimizing the sum of handling and space costs. In doing so, the assumption of perfect sharing is also relaxed. Using computational experiments, the authors characterize the operating conditions based on pick density and cost ratio. The authors further outline an approach to decide the conditions under which it is advantageous to implement multiple classes.

More classes are preferred when both the pick density and cost ratio are higher and vice versa. Factors such as demand skewness, lane depth and stacking height affect the space-sharing dynamics.

The paper gives the practical insights on when the conditions under which it is advisable to partition a warehouse into a certain number of classes instead of maintaining and when to maintain as a single-class block. It also gives a method to estimate the space-sharing factor, given a combination of operating parameters.

Very few studies have seen class-based storage policy in the context of block stacked warehouse layout. Further, block stacking designs have mostly been approached with the objective of minimizing just the space cost. This study contributes to the literature by developing an integrated model, which has the practical utility.

Warehousing is a waste of time and money. Goods that are in store are idle goods and the longer they stay in storage the more they cost. The less warehousing, then, the better. A few companies have managed to organise a retailing operation without own warehousing by direct scheduling from manufacturer or supplier to the retail outlet. However, for the vast majority a warehouse is necessary in order to provide a buffer between supply and demand, to take advantage of bulk purchasing and to guarantee a service level to the customer on a reasonable number of products. Clearly, a warehouse should be scientifically sited and designed. It is at the hub of a distribution network and as such must be a highly efficient unit if it is not to wreck the entire system. In previous articles (RDM Jan/Feb and May/June 1974), the authors considered the overall distribution network including the determination of the number of warehouses and their siting. They now consider warehouse design and, more particularly, how this design should be matched to the throughput.

The kitting feeding policy creates kits with the parts of each product to assemble. Each kit contains elements with heterogeneous physical properties imposing heterogeneous logistic facilities and management solutions for storage and handling. The purpose of this paper is to present and apply a two-step procedure to design the part warehouse layout and to assign locations in case of kitting with high-variety part attributes. The proposed procedure aims at reducing the kitting travelled distance, shortening the picker paths, best positioning the components in the warehouse to enhance the possibility of creating kits through a single corridor access. The saturation of the warehouse and the minimization of the required storage space are also considered.

Starting from part categorization, the proposed two-step procedure, of general applicability, designs the component warehouse, sizing the corridors (Step 1) before clustering the kits in terms of part commonality and best-assigning clusters to corridors (Step 2) with the goal of reducing the travelled distance and saturating the available storage space.

A comparison model considers the traditional versus the proposed warehouse layout highlighting the potential saving in the picker travelled distance. A case study taken from the harvesting machine agricultural sector exemplifies the applicability and the practical implications of this research.

Elements of originality are the warehouse design strategy and the assignment model for parts based on their physical attributes and their occurrence in the assembly kits. Finally, the case study taken from industry, with a high number of components and part categories, adds value to the research making the proposed procedure able to address large-scale industrial problems.

Empowered by the possibility to automatically identify unique instances, radio frequency identification (RFID) is expected to revolutionize warehouse processes. However, every warehouse differs from each other in several ways. Given such dimensionality, a credible assessment of the true value of RFID requires that the contextual factors that differentiate one warehouse from another are taken into account. The same RFID implementation may generate high productivity in one warehouse but not in another, because the former warehouse may have characteristics that may influence the impact of RFID. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for identifying key contextual factors that appear to be contingent on the link between RFID and warehouse performance.

The framework derived from a two‐phase research design. The first phase incorporated two case studies. This was an exploratory study and, therefore, there was a great deal of iteration between the cases studies and the literature. The objective was to identify important contextual factors that may moderate the impact of RFID. The second phase incorporated simulation modelling. This was a confirmatory study. The objective was to develop two simulation models of the cases from the previous phase, and as a result, verify the effects of particular contextual factors on process performance.

As an outcome of this research, an initial subset of “warehouse contextual factors” is developed that may moderate the impact of RFID on warehouse performance. The framework is not an evaluating technique, but is a useful starting point for examining the value of RFID in the warehouse context.

Further work is required to support the significance of the moderating effects of the proposed contextual factors.

For practicing managers the paper directs attention to key warehouse contextual factors that appear to be contingent on the link between RFID and warehouse performance. It also confirms that the achievement of RFID value is attainable only in combination with the redesign of business processes.

The paper integrates both theoretical and practical considerations regarding formalization of the contextual factors that may moderate the impact of RFID on warehouse performance. Therefore, it represents an initial step in building theory to develop guidelines for understanding the variance in the performance between different RFID‐enabled warehouse settings.